I’m the real life cop from BBC’s Sixth Commandment who helped put twisted killer Ben Field away – here’s how I did it
WHEN pensioner Peter Farquhar pledged himself to 23-year-old church warden Ben Field in a 2014 “betrothal ceremony” he wrote: “It is one of the happiest moments of my life. Gone are the fears of dying alone.”
The following year the 69-year-old was dead — at the hands of the man he thought would save him from loneliness.
Field had persuaded the retired English teacher to change his will and subjected him to a long campaign of physical and mental torture before poisoning and suffocating him at his home in the pretty Buckinghamshire village of Maids Moreton.
He also struck up a “romance” with Peter’s neighbour Ann Moore-Martin, then 83, who also altered her will in Field’s favour.
The crimes are the focus of BBC One drama The Sixth Commandment, which concluded last night, with Timothy Spall as victim Peter and Eanna Hardwicke as Ben Field.
Viewers described the drama — a reference to the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, alluding to victim Peter’s Christian faith — as “brutally heartbreaking”, with one calling it “compelling, disturbing and chilling”.
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Others called for Timothy Spall to win a Bafta for his heartrending portrayal of Peter’s tragic decline.
Skilled manipulator
Anne Reid, who played elderly victim Ann, was also praised for her performance and one fan added: “The fact it is a true story makes it all the more terrifying, sad, gripping, horrific and absorbing all at once.”
DCI Mark Glover — who helped to bring Field to justice and saw him jailed for 36 years in 2019 — told The Sun he could see why people were drawn to him, adding: “Ben Field could identify vulnerabilities in people within minutes of meeting them and he used that to his advantage.
“After his arrest he tried that with the interviewing officers. He was always courteous and polite but he was looking for a weakness he could exploit so he could take control. He is a skilled manipulator.”
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After 30 years in the force, Mark retired in May 2018 in the midst of the investigation.
But as viewers saw, he returned as a civilian investigator a month later to complete the case.
It was the tireless work of Mark and his team that helped to secure the conviction of Field, who may have claimed more victims if he had not been stopped.
He had been a 20-year-old student when he first met Peter at the University of Buckingham, where he occasionally lectured.
As a deeply religious man, Peter struggled to come to terms with his sexuality and had previously written a novel, Between Boy And Man, which featured a school chaplain unable to reconcile his Christian faith with his homosexuality.
Field, the son of a Baptist minister, played on this vulnerability, bombarding the older man with poetry and letters and declaring his love for him, after just a few meetings.
They became intimate, with Field moving into Peter’s spacious house in 2013.
He also persuaded Peter to take in his friend, Martyn Smith, as a lodger.
But while Field expressed devotion in public, a document found after his arrest exposed his true feelings, describing his “partner” in scathing terms as a “closeted, Christian, homosexual, English-teaching pedant”.
Scathing terms
He also described his relationship with Peter as “vulgarly commercial”, boasting: “He gives me things, and he gets me for a length of time.”
In a sinister message to a friend, Field wrote: “He and I have struck a deal which is I pay for nothing and will hang out with him until his eventual death win/win . . . I’m pretty comfortable w/death.”
Once Field had won Peter’s trust he began plying him with alcohol and lacing his food with drugs, causing hallucinations and night terrors.
He also began gaslighting him, deleting contacts from Peter’s phone and convincing him he had done it himself, and hiding his things in an attempt to make him think he was suffering from dementia.
Peter would often wake up covered in bruises, with no memory of what had happened, and he was convinced he was losing his mind.
Terrified and confused, he told his vicar: “Pray for me. There is evil in my house.”
Field tried to convince Peter’s friends and family he was drinking to excess, and set the scene so his imminent death would look like an accidental overdose or even suicide.
When Peter changed his will, leaving everything to Field, his fate was sealed.
In October 2015 his tormentor plied him with prescription drugs and alcohol, and police believe he then smothered him with a pillow.
After inheriting £162,000 from his victim, Field moved on to his elderly neighbour Ann, a devout Catholic who lived alone.
Believing his declarations of affection, she began a sexual relationship with him, giving him a key to her house and even hanging a framed photograph of him in her bedroom, bearing the words: “I am always with you”.
When she gave Field £4,000 to buy a car, he hired one for the day and pocketed the rest.
When he claimed a terminally ill brother needed treatment, she gave him £27,000.
Scrawled messages
As his plot took shape he scrawled messages on her mirror, telling her they were from God.
One read: “Ben makes you whole, Give the whole to him,” and another said: “All that you give him will be returned tenfold.”
But at his 2019 trial Field admitted: “The mirror writing was all fake, the relationship was all fake and done with gain in mind.
“I have deceived absolutely everybody that I have any kind of relationship with.”
At the end of 2016 Ann made him the sole beneficiary of her will, and the following February she was hospitalised with a seizure.
She had told friends Field had given her “some powder” to help her sleep, although it is not known what caused her illness.
Ann’s niece Ann-Marie Blake, played by Annabel Scholey in the drama, visited her aunt in hospital and was horrified when she heard about the relationship with Field, and the writing on the mirror, and reported it to the police, who began an investigation.
Mark said: “In March 2017 the CID arrested Field and Smith and a lot of property was recovered in the house searches, then Peter’s name came up, as he lived a couple of doors down.
“When we started to research Peter, there were a lot of similarities about his decline in healthcare towards the end of his life — and then we found that Field was the beneficiary in both of their wills and the alarm bells really started ringing.”
Ann never returned home but died of natural causes in a care home a few weeks later, after changing back her will in favour of her family.
Mark said: “She knew she had been done over by Ben Field and that he didn’t love her. That must have dwelled really heavily upon her for the last few weeks of her life.”
Body exhumed
After Field’s arrest, Mark and his team at Thames Valley Police began to delve into Peter’s death two years earlier and exhumed his body for a post mortem in May 2017.
Hair samples showed he had been given drugs for at least six months before his death.
In January 2018, Field was arrested again and in a second house search police discovered notebooks with chilling fantasies about murdering 50 people in one night, and three missing journals written by Peter, an avid diarist, which detailed his rapid decline and some of Field’s cruel jibes.
Mark said: “By then we had more of an idea what we were looking for but we didn’t realise Field had been documenting everything he’d done.
“It was chilling but it was a massive breakthrough for us because we thought we knew what had happened, but we didn’t have the evidence to support our theory.
“Incredibly he had documented the quantities of drugs he had covertly given Peter, which is something many poisoners do, to record the amount and the effect it has. But Field actually enjoyed what he was doing and unfortunately he got satisfaction from seeing the results.”
On his computer Mark’s team found a list of 100 potential victims, listed as “clients” — which included Field’s own parents and grandparents.
Field was charged with murder, fraud, conspiracy to murder and attempted murder.
At Oxford Crown Court he admitted faking the relationships with the pensioners as part of his plan to get them to change their wills, but denied murder.
Martyn Smith was acquitted of all charges at the trial, which heard that Field had a “profound fascination in controlling and manipulating and humiliating and killing”.
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Mark added: “Ben Field is an evil, cruel, controlling, manipulative man.
“He is a terrible person.”
